Towards a future-oriented political ecology of climate change

Abstract

Unprecedented climate extremes will likely become a new ‘normal’. Urban political ecology is thus confronted with the challenge of exploring and theorising emerging geographies of unprecedented climate change. This raises questions on the extent and ways in which past socionatures can be mobilised for this task. It also urges a critical reflection on what forms of knowledge are needed to meet political ecology’s normative aspirations of transforming emerging and future socionatures of climate change. I argue that a critique of past and present socionatures alone is not enough to meet these theoretical and normative goals. The main objective of this paper, therefore, is to lay the foundations of a future-oriented urban political ecology that approaches geographies of climate change more experimentally and speculatively. To this aim, I examine the explanatory potential of two (of many possible) experiments, collaboratively developed by a team of hydrologists, climatologists, and political ecologists. Both experiments depart from past and present logics of colonial violence, racial capitalism, and climate change, but explore competing notions of unprecedented futures. The first experiment consists of a critical-realist scenario approach that examines how power and variability in the exercise of agency might shape outcomes of future unprecedented climate extremes. The second involves a model that speculatively brings about a better world in response to climate extremes and lays the foundation of a political ecology of possibility. The paper thereby serves as a demonstration of how critique can be mobilised to explore and reimagine urban futures.